Dana Jonson [00:00:09]:
Hello and welcome back to special Ed. On Special Ed, I am your host, Dana Johnson, and today I have a truly inspiring guest joining me, Maxwell Ivy. Also known as the Blind Blogger. Maxwell is a blind entrepreneur, author, speaker, and accessibility advocate who’s made it his mission to show the world how accessibility can lead growth, inclusion, and opportunity. Despite facing significant challenges due to his blindness, Maxwell has built a successful career helping businesses, nonprofits and organizations embrace accessibility not just as a legal requirement, but as a way to create a better experience for everyone. Today, Maxwell is going to share with us his journey from a family of carnival owners, which I’m so excited to hear about, to becoming a respected online entrepreneur and accessible consultant. So welcome, Maxwell. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Maxwell Ivey [00:01:01]:
Well, hi, Dana. Thank you so much for having me on your podcast and I’m looking forward to us having a great conversation.

Dana Jonson [00:01:07]:
Excellent. Well, before we get started, I always have to play my disclaimer because I’m a lawyer and all. We have lots of disclaimers, so let’s do that.

Disclaimer [00:01:14]:
The information in this podcast is provided for general informational and entertainment purposes only and may not reflect the current law in your jurisdiction at the time you’re listening. Nothing in this episode creates an attorney client relationship, nor is it legal advice. Do not act or refrain from acting on the basis of any information included in or accessible through this episode without seeking appropriate legal or other professional advice on particular facts and circumstances at issue from a lawyer or service provider licensed in your state, country or other appropriate licensing jurisdiction.

Dana Jonson [00:01:35]:
Maxwell, I think I just would really love to start from the beginning. You come from a family of carnival owners? I don’t think I’ve spoken to anyone with that kind of background. How did you come from there to here?

Maxwell Ivey [00:01:47]:
Right. Well, I was born into a family of carnival owners. My grandfather started a show in the 50s and grew up. That was all I ever wanted to be, and that was all most of my relatives did. So it didn’t seem unusual to us, obviously. But I also knew that eventually I would lose most, if not all, of my vision to retinitis pigmentosa.

Dana Jonson [00:02:08]:
You weren’t born blind?

Maxwell Ivey [00:02:09]:
No, I had. I had perfect vision when I was born, but I lost it gradually over time until I entered junior high school. And then I had a big drop off in vision, which is fairly common with men with RP that they have a big drop off when they enter puberty. And it stayed constant until I went off to college. By the time I graduated from Texas A and M and Corpus Christi, it was down to what it is now, which is very limited light perception. I can see light if I look directly at the source or if it’s very large, very bright. But I cannot see colors, shapes, or shadows. I tell people my LED comes in white, yellow, and blue, and when I look at it, it’s all the same color.

Maxwell Ivey [00:02:47]:
So I have no functional vision. So I find it’s usually easier to tell just to tell most people. I’m totally blind. That seems to be sick work. So growing up when I was five, my grandmother put me to work in her cotton candy stand. I was the person who put the popcorn in the boxes and put the butter on them, and I put the syrup on the snow cones. At that time, the machinery was too dangerous to let me actually make the popcorn or grind the snow cone ice. But they figured it was safer having me inside the little trailer working than it was having me outside wandering around the midway.

Maxwell Ivey [00:03:20]:
So as I got older, I moved on to working in games. I helped do some of the booking. I went off to college with the idea of becoming an attorney, because pretty much in the amusement world, you can never have enough attorneys in your family. And so that seemed like a good place for bags to go. My grades and my law school admissions test scores were not good enough to get to any of those schools here in Texas. And at that time, Texas A and M had not made their agreement with UT to where Texas A and M has its own law school, which they do now, because as. As I know, you know, if your university system has a law school, then they do make certain allowances to help their own students get in ahead of other people’s students. But I didn’t even have that.

Maxwell Ivey [00:04:08]:
So I went to World Services for the Blind. Wanted to be a tax collector for the IRS over the phone. I did that for two and a half years until I decided my mental health was worth more than $15,700 a year. And because, trust me, you can only take so many people telling me that. Telling you, you’re throwing me out of my house, you’re causing my kids not to eat so much car. You know, I mean, yeah, you’re not.

Dana Jonson [00:04:33]:
Getting people at their best.

Maxwell Ivey [00:04:34]:
No, not at their best. Not at their best. So I went back to the family carnival. I bought. I bought a game trailer. I started working the business, and I was happy doing that. We were starting to grow the business. In 2003, my dad died from lung cancer.

Maxwell Ivey [00:04:48]:
By 2006, we were out of the business, and I needed something to do with myself, because I’m not Really one of those people who does well with nothing to do. My brother’s good at it, but I stink at it. So the only thing I figured I knew how to do was, was sell the used rides because in our family the only way we could afford to buy a new ride or newer one was to sell something we already had. And so I figured I knew how to do that. And just in case anybody’s interested, there is still one member of our family in the carnival business, my younger cousin Jason. He’s still in the business and he recently bought out another carnival where he’s the second or third largest carnival in Texas, which is staying something. And they travel from Corpus to Nebraska or Minnesota and back. They work 50 weeks a year and they work a lot harder than we ever did.

Maxwell Ivey [00:05:33]:
So. But I started helping people sell rides and the first thing I realized is I didn’t know nothing about being an online business owner. So I had to learn everything, which started with me having to teach myself how to code HTML so that I could get my website online. Because at that time There was no WordPress or Wix or GoDaddy.

Dana Jonson [00:05:51]:
Yeah, and you think about it, that wasn’t that long ago, right? I mean, I’m thinking you’re talking about a time I was just getting out of law school and most lawyers didn’t even have website. It wasn’t that long ago. It’s crazy how our technology has advanced.

Maxwell Ivey [00:06:03]:
Yeah, you’re right. Well, I founded my website, the Midway Marketplace, in September of 2007. That’s 17 years ago. And I would say the website was probably up and rolling, you know, at its best by say, say a couple years into that, so say 15 years. And we’ve gone from I’ time when there wasn’t any option other than coding it or paying somebody to code it, to having all these new options now for website building software or content content management systems like WordPress and Drupal. And so now we’re in a much better position as far as accessibility goes on the back end for somebody who’s an entrepreneur or aspires to run their own business and wants to be able to get that business online without paying other people hundreds or thousands of dollars to help them do that. So that that at least has changed. I also had to learn how to recruit clients and set fees and write copy and collect debts and lots of things that aren’t all that fun with having your own business.

Maxwell Ivey [00:07:04]:
But I learned them. People were impressed that I took on all these challenges with joy and they asked me to Share more about being a blind entrepreneur. And I decided to do that with a new website, theblindblogger.net and that was a name people had been using for me online as a form of shorthand. Because, as I’m sure you know, when you are a person with a disability, you are pretty much the only person with that disability in your immediate community. So I was. I was the blind guy, and I was a blogger, so I became the blind blogger, and it’s kind of stuck. So that’s.

Dana Jonson [00:07:35]:
So what transitioned you into advocating for. For all this? Because I’m thinking, like, you didn’t have a lot as far as education, because first you started your education with your site. It started to drop off. But even so, back then, I can’t imagine that there was a tremendous amount in school for you to help prepare you for what life would be like without your sight.

Maxwell Ivey [00:07:58]:
No. Well, luckily, they didn’t have to prepare us for computers. That was what they prepare us for. As I was losing my vision, it became harder and harder to take math and science classes. I firmly believe that my education would have probably taken a different path if my vision or the technology would have allowed me to do that. And so I. The last advanced math class I took, I took geometry in high school. And we had somebody in the special education department who would take each geometry problem or each set of.

Maxwell Ivey [00:08:34]:
Of images or examples or whatever you want to call them, and they would blow those up to like, say, like, 14 by 20 pieces of paper so that I could still. Still see enough of them to figure out what was there and then what is missing and then decide, well, how do I solve these particular problems? And I swear, there were days I turned my homework in and it weighed three pounds, and the. And the magic Marker fumes off of it would give you a contact high.

Dana Jonson [00:09:04]:
And that’s what was. That’s. That’s what probably considered, you know, specialized instruction for you at that time. That’s insane. I mean, we’re just talking about the advance of technology, so you had to learn all of this as a. As an entrepreneur on your own. Was that part of that advocacy component? Has that always been there? Or was that something that just sort of developed as you were developing your business?

Maxwell Ivey [00:09:27]:
I think it’s something that just developed. I have good friends who tell me, Max, you’ve always been advocating for accessibility. You just didn’t think about it while you were doing it. And I think that’s probably as true as we can get on the topic. For example, I just recently found out that when I started like eight or nine years ago, allowing people to call me the blind blogger, that I was breaking a stigma. I thought I was just taking on a cool nickname. I did not realize that I was one of the few at that time willing to be open about my disability online and not caring how that affected people because it just happened to fit me. And once somebody asked me to think back to those days in a recent podcast interview, I thought, you know, there were people I knew online who stopped being my friends when I took that name.

Maxwell Ivey [00:10:12]:
And there, some of them were cited and some of them were visually impaired and apparently there was something wrong with me doing it. I didn’t really understand all of that at the time that to some people this was considered a, a negative thing for me to take that name. But what’s really, what’s really cool is I can now say that all these people today who use the emoticons representing disabilities in their social media posts, their profile pages, their text messages, I was doing that before anybody else thought it was cool. So I feel like, at least in that respect, I was an accessibility trailblazer or at least a disability trailblazer. And again, just didn’t realize I was doing it. And you know, over time when, when I would run into a problem with a website, I would reach out to the tech people and I would go, hey, I’m visually impaired. This is the technology I’m using. This is the problem I’m having.

Maxwell Ivey [00:11:03]:
Is there some way you to help me solve this? And in some cases their answer was, well, we can’t fix it, but we can do it for you. Such as creating a profile for my account at Path Forward podmax. Some of them would go, we don’t want to do this for you, but we don’t think we can fix it right yet. And so we would work together and figure out a workaround. Is there, you know, what steps does Max have to do to accomplish the task, even if it’s not exactly the best way to do it or the way Max would want to do it. And then in those, a few great occasions, they basically did both. They said, okay, we’re going to do the workaround, but after we do the workaround, we’re actually going to fix this stuff. And, and we want you to help us fix this stuff.

Maxwell Ivey [00:11:48]:
So. And I feel like one of the things that I do that a lot of other people don’t is when I approach businesses about their lack of accessibility, I always do it in a positive, non threatening manner of let’s solve a problem as opposed to you realize you are a no good lion dog of a human being. And if you don’t fix this tomorrow, I’m going to call my attorney or the National Federation of the Blind or I’m going to start a social media boycott against you. I find that because of my non threatening approach, I have made a lot of progress, one website at a time, one publication at a time. And I really feel like in the disability community we use the stick a lot, but we don’t use the carrot enough.

Dana Jonson [00:12:27]:
I think that that’s an interesting, an interesting way to put it. I mean the collaboration and involving other people in the decision making and in the process, rather than dictating what they have to do. I want to go back to what you’re saying about when you first took on the blind blogger as, as your sort of online Persona. And I forget, you know, a lot of people do with disabilities do love being online because their disabilities don’t exist there. Right. You know, they can kind of put them behind them and they don’t have to put them out front. And it’s, it’s fascinating to me to hear that that would have been sort of a negative for anybody because I mean, well, to me I’m. I know I’m not the typical person, but I find that interesting.

Dana Jonson [00:13:08]:
Right. The blind blogger, you’d think that would draw some interest. But maybe, perhaps if some people were trying to push away from that or felt that it was more trying to think of the right word. You know, you weren’t in advocacy then. That was just your nickname, right? That wasn’t. You weren’t trying to tell people what to do or how to do it. You were just, this is who I am. And I think sometimes those are the best examp.

Maxwell Ivey [00:13:28]:
Well, I like to say that a lot of the best things that happen happen when we don’t think about them and just do them. That’s been the case for me probably more often than it should be as an entrepreneur, as somebody people look at as an example. But I think the main thing that I heard the most is people were just offended. I was playing the quote, blind card.

Dana Jonson [00:13:51]:
At least that’s how playing the blind card, it’s. Other than just sort of mentioning facts.

Maxwell Ivey [00:13:57]:
Yeah, that’s what some people were offended by. See, that’s one of the things as a community, we get so twisted up over some of the most meaningless things and lose sight of some of the more important things. It happens all the darn time.

Dana Jonson [00:14:10]:
That’s so interesting to Me, because I’m trying to think what would be the benefits of the blind card? You know what I mean? What does that even mean?

Maxwell Ivey [00:14:18]:
Well, you know, it would be like if in another minority group, if somebody was accused of playing a race card.

Dana Jonson [00:14:24]:
Yeah, I guess. I mean, it’s.

Maxwell Ivey [00:14:27]:
So that’s all I can figure. That’s.

Dana Jonson [00:14:28]:
Yeah.

Maxwell Ivey [00:14:29]:
What I interpreted from what has been said to me. But like I said, it’s really cool nowadays to talk to people in my community, people who have been advocating as their number one purpose for years, tell me, you know, Max, you were doing something nobody else was doing and, you know, you weren’t even doing it to make a point, you were just doing it. And so, yeah, it’s in line with a lot of things that have happened in my life where I did the work without really thinking about it. And then a month, a year or five years later, I find out, you know, just how special what I was doing was at the time.

Dana Jonson [00:15:02]:
Interesting. So when you’re talking about also the accessibility and you’re calling companies and saying, I can’t use your website or whatever, you know, however you end up in contact with them, what are the long term benefits of companies and businesses making themselves more accessible? Because as we were talking before we got on air, which was. We were talking about how we know that inclusivity is beneficial to everyone. Right. To have different people, opinions, backgrounds, abilities that. That always benefits everyone in the classroom, I can’t imagine it wouldn’t benefit everyone in the business world. So is it in the company’s best interest to be making themselves accessible?

Maxwell Ivey [00:15:44]:
I think what you just asked me would be the definition of a softball question. Because that’s. Because that’s how I do things. Yeah, I totally agree that it is in the best interest. But as you know and we talked about before, from your experience on the educational side of things, they. In both cases in business and education, everybody knows that inclusion works, that it benefits everyone. The problem is, is that most people just don’t want to do what they know they need to do. It’s kind of like somebody who weighs 600 pounds and they know what they need to do to get healthy, but they still ain’t done it or ain’t gonna do it, you know, so we both know that it comes down to fear and overwhelm and just the actual dollars and cents and time involved, costs of being inclusive, but the return on the investment.

Maxwell Ivey [00:16:36]:
And then as we mentioned earlier, it’s not just the return on the investment, it’s the lost potential that you never have an opportunity to benefit from. That’s also in that equation. So these are the four things I talk to business owners about when we’re talking about inclusion. First, when you improve accessibility, you improve the user experience for everyone, not just the person with a disability. Second, when you improve accessibility, you will improve the search engine optimization for a website or an app. And I have yet to meet a website owner who doesn’t want more traffic. Third, by improving accessibility, you give yourself the opportunity to reach a community of consumers that are highly loyal. As a community, the disability community, we will support products and services that are making the effort to be inclusive.

Maxwell Ivey [00:17:29]:
We will support them during hard times, and we will even see paying more money for that product as an additional value added because of the accessibility, because so few companies are start doing it even now. So you have the opportunity to reach this highly loyal community of buyers who will promote the heck out of people who are making the effort. And that doesn’t just mean our friends, families, but also means our social media networks, and in some cases it can even mean the, the broadcast media, the news media. So that’s number three. And then number four. And this one we don’t talk about as much, but we need to talk about more is that when you hire people with disabilities, you give yourself the opportunity to add people to your team who in general are positive, optimistic, dedicated, loyal, and by virtue of having to live with a disability, they have no choice but to be creative problem solvers. That becomes part of your life. There’s really no way to avoid it.

Maxwell Ivey [00:18:28]:
And then this morning I was writing email and I thought, you know, Max, there’s. There’s one more thing you don’t usually talk about, and that is I like to say to my friends that my vision loss has taught me patience. And it’s also taught me to accept the things that I have no control over. And I think those are a couple of other things that many people with disabilities have had to learn to live with. So these are just so many aspects of including people with disabilities that are benefits. And many of them are documented. I recently ran across a study that said if you make an effort in accessibility in your products and the marketing, that you can gross 1.7 times more money and make 4.1 times more profit. So by embracing accessibility, Instead of making 100 bucks, you can make 170 and gross, that is.

Maxwell Ivey [00:19:13]:
And if you, by embracing accessibility, Instead of clearing 100 bucks, you can clear up to 410 bucks. You know, those are, those are, to me, those are Some crazy numbers that shouldn’t be ignored. But they’re are businesses out there who are going to ignore them.

Dana Jonson [00:19:28]:
Well, and sometimes you have to go right to the money. Right? That’s what makes people listen. And I know when I talk about education and early intervention, which sometimes we get pushback on because it can be very expensive and very intensive, but that early intervention is going to produce a much more independent student eventually who has a much stronger chance of being a contributing member of society and is going to cost us less money as a society. And so why wouldn’t we make that investment? It’s sort of, you know, it’s around the same thing. It’s a cost benefit analysis. You put that effort in and you’re going to get so much more back. So what is the resistance?

Maxwell Ivey [00:20:04]:
I think the main resistance is just, is just the overwhelm, the fear. It’s dealing with something that in their opinion is foreign and alien to them, that they have no understanding of and that they really don’t have any time to find understanding of. And I, I feel like a couple of things we could do to really help people in this area is to talk about accessibility as a process where it doesn’t have to be perfect right away and it’s not going to stay perfect because accessibility is fragile, especially on the Internet where we’re constantly adding new websites, apps and new content to existing websites. So if we could talk about it more as a journey, as an interactive process on the educational side, where we say we want to make this a collaboration between the teachers, the students, the para teachers, the administrators and the, and the government agency folks, I think that would help. Also, if we could get people beyond thinking that they’re going to be the only one responsible for making these changes or figuring out how to pay for them, that can be helpful. Approaching it as a collaborative thing, which you mentioned earlier, I think really helps, but it is the fear. And one thing I’ve found that helps with business owners is if I put it to them this way, I ask them, how would you solve for any other problem in your business? I mean, if you’re not making enough money, what would you do if people aren’t paying their bills and your accounts receivable or growing, what would you do if you can’t hire the ideal right person for the job you have open, what would you do? What is your process? How do you solve those problems for any other thing that isn’t working in your business? And then instead of thinking of accessibility and inclusion as something that’s Totally different. Think of it.

Maxwell Ivey [00:21:44]:
Okay, I may not be real familiar with this stuff and I may have to learn some stuff, but if we apply our usual process for solving for any problem in this business, this is what we would do for accessibility.

Dana Jonson [00:21:56]:
I love that and I love what you said before about creative problem solving, that individuals who’ve had to overcome different barriers have had much more experience in that creative problem solving. And I think that’s exactly what you’re talking about right with any business. How do you solve your problems? What is your creative problem solving process? I think there’s not enough of that taught in school at all. I think we need to be teaching a lot more critical thinking, period in school. But that’s a different conversation. But I think that’s a really interesting perspective. Now I agree completely about the collaborative thing. And when I get involved with families and I’m working with school districts, to the extent possible that we can be collaborative, I find it to be much more productive and the results last much longer.

Dana Jonson [00:22:47]:
That being said, parents don’t usually call me because the school is being really collaborative and everything’s going well. So sometimes it’s getting the attorneys involved that that makes it collaborative. But when it’s not, we rely on the laws and the rules and the regulations to enforce the rights that parents have. And I agree with the collaborative piece. But do you feel that we need more as far as maybe legislatively or. I mean, I guess that’s what I’m thinking is legislatively. You and I were talking about how the state level tends to make more differences than the federal level. But especially when we’re talking about the Internet, that’s something that’s so hard to regulate and so wide reaching.

Dana Jonson [00:23:33]:
What can we do to encourage more people to be more inclusive? Or is this just a movement we just have to kind of try and collaborate with people and hope for the best?

Maxwell Ivey [00:23:44]:
Well, if you remember, I said that we spend too much time on the stick. I didn’t say we shouldn’t spend any time at all on the stick.

Dana Jonson [00:23:51]:
That’s true.

Maxwell Ivey [00:23:52]:
I said we spent too much time. We have to use all the tools that are available to us. And when I talk about a collaborative approach to solving a problem, say for a website or a business, I’m talking about the business owner, me, as a representative of the disability community, the tech people, the available automation options that are out there, that can be relied on to deliver actual improvements in accessibility as opposed to those that deliver marketing based improvements instead of actual accessibility. So all those things together and that’s in a case where they’ve decided they’re ready to invest in accessibility. So, yes, it would be better if we had more regulation. The sad thing is, when it comes to accessibility in general and digital accessibility especially, the laws that have been passed in the last 30 years were never really intended to have much in the way of teeth. You know, the Americans with a Disability act, it’s not just the reasonable accommodation piece. It’s the fact that the primary method for enforcing it is taking people to court.

Maxwell Ivey [00:24:54]:
And oh, by the way, they cap the lawyer’s fees. So most attorneys don’t want to take accessibility ADA related cases. I mean, so well.

Dana Jonson [00:25:02]:
And I mean, usually the goal is to get them to fix what they didn’t do in the first place. So, you know, it is, what, what is the purpose of protracted litigation if the, you know, why don’t we just do it, you know, get it done. And I, I think that’s the part that always baffles me. And I, I know it always comes down to money, right? That’s, that’s the bottom line. But I think, as you’re saying, when things are more. What’s the right way to put it? It’s the unknown, right? It’s the fear of the unknown. So if I don’t know how to make my website accessible, the thought of trying to figure that out and learning something new is so daunting. Maybe it’ll cost me more money.

Dana Jonson [00:25:41]:
Maybe I have to hire a different web person, maybe I have to learn a different code or whatever the components are. And how do we make those things more accessible and easier? I mean, I think now with technology and especially with AI taking over the world, you know, those kinds of ideas are going to be a little bit easier to, particularly when we’re talking about the Internet and websites and things like, I’m thinking online business sort of things. There’s a lot within the real world too when you, when you walk into a business physically, that, that to make things more accessible for a variety of disabilities. But how do we make those things more commonplace?

Maxwell Ivey [00:26:19]:
Right. I think if one of the things we haven’t talked about is inertia, either positively or negatively. I think in the digital world, especially in the education side, we deal with that inertia that school districts, school administrators, they have an established practice as to how they’ve done things for a long time. And bringing somebody with a disability or a family who has a child with a disability into that system is very challenging for them because they have years, if not hundreds of years of inertia, of established practice built up that they are not going to easily deviate from. And on the other side, you have the positive inertia of the fact that at least in the physical world, we have had certain accessibility standards that have become so commonplace that nobody would think about building a building or opening a business without them. Without a certain number of parking spaces, wheelchair ramps, elevators, you know, certain things with the width of hallways, doorways, those sorts of things. Those things have been part of the mindset of a builder in the fiscal world for so long that nobody even thinks about it. They don’t even argue about it anymore.

Maxwell Ivey [00:27:31]:
They just. I mean, yeah, I’m sure that at the, at the legislative level, there are probably regular fights over what that number should be, but once the number is set by the state or local or federal government, the contractors just go along with it. And so I feel like one of the things we are going to have to do is continue to make the arguments that accessibility is in their best interest, continue to educate people on how to make the Internet more accessible, take advantage of the tools you mentioned like generative AI, and hopefully in another five or ten years, we won’t still be at 3 to 5% accessibility online. Wow.

Dana Jonson [00:28:07]:
It’s just 3 to 5%. That’s incredible. That’s. That’s insane.

Maxwell Ivey [00:28:10]:
That is very insane. And you know, it goes back to what I said about the stick isn’t getting us there because we’ve had the national rehabilitation act for 50 years, we’ve had the Americans with Disabilities act for 30 years. We’ve made a lot of progress in in person accessibility. But more and more of our lives is being lived online these days, and we’re not making the same progress for digital accessibility. The legislation isn’t keeping up with online personal and privacy, and it sure as heck ain’t keeping up with accessibility for people with disabilities, especially because there’s just such a wide range of disabilities that people have to develop for within those disabilities, there’s a wide range of technology and comfort levels with the technology. And even certain parts of the world, there’s a different level of what’s available and what’s actually commonplace to where people know how to use it on the same level as, say, somebody, you know, born and raised here in the United States. I one of the things I like to do to keep myself humble is to do podcasts with people from Pakistan or China or Eastern Europe because they remind me that, you know, my iPhone is not something a lot of people in that part of the world wouldn’t have that my computer would cost as much as I hated the price I paid for this last MacBook, that it probably costs three times that much in, you know, in Bulgaria or something.

Dana Jonson [00:29:35]:
So, yeah, the access is different. Well, and I think, I mean, our legislation hasn’t caught up to technology, period. Right. And I also think that, you know, with the advances in technology, we also rely heavily on the individual. So, you know, like I could hear your computer telling you what was on the screen. You know, a lot of people are relying on you to have the technology to accommodate yourself versus doing something, them doing something on their end to make it more accessible. But a lot of those accessibility components, they need something accessible to interact with. Right.

Dana Jonson [00:30:10]:
Because otherwise it’s not, it’s not going to provide you the information that you need in the right way.

Maxwell Ivey [00:30:16]:
Right. In the, in the old days and before computers, the phrase actually comes from, from accounting and bookkeeping, they used to say garbage in, garbage out. And basically with adaptive technology, in a lot of cases, if the website or app hasn’t been properly developed, then there’s only so much the technology on my end of the equation is going to be able to do to deal with whatever it is they have produced. And that’s especially true with images, video and audio. And as we all know, that’s where the largest and fastest proliferation of the Internet is coming from, is from media. So there are some good AI tools for images, but I still challenge any webmaster or blog owner to add the alternative text tags to their images. I recently got. I was told about a thing called Pixi that was developed by people who are visually impaired.

Maxwell Ivey [00:31:12]:
It’s an AI plugin that will automatically describe images at a very high level. And I haven’t tested it yet, so I don’t know exactly how good it’s going to be. But when I have been playing around with ChatGPT on my phone asking questions about, you know, how should I write this email? Or how should I describe what I do? The chat GPT responses have been eerily scarily on point, to the point where, you know, they, I feel sorry for people who the only thing they do for a living is write copy. Because I mean, what’s that GPT is. I understand they recently tried it out with a legal case and it didn’t fare so well.

Dana Jonson [00:31:55]:
So well, it’s still, you know, it’s still missing that human touch. But I think, you know, the generative AI can do a lot and it’ll be important for us all to learn how to use it as a tool rather than rely on it. You know, it can’t necessarily do my job for me, but it will be important for lawyers to understand how it can benefit our practices and our work in order to be more efficient than to let it go. And I think that’s the same for just about any profession.

Maxwell Ivey [00:32:26]:
Right. Another thing about, about artificial intelligence that anytime I get an opportunity to speak on the subject, I bring this up. The ChatGPT is making a lot of assumptions, decisions, whatever you want to call it, on its own, from its own programming. But people with disabilities need to be speaking with the people who are developing these technologies. We need to have a seat at the table. We need to be in the boardrooms, in the workrooms where these things are being developed. Because I don’t fear this. I want to make it clear that I’m not scared, like a lot of people seem to be with generative AI.

Maxwell Ivey [00:33:09]:
But I am concerned that, just like humans, that generative AI could decide that accessibility is not worth the effort. And I feel like that’s where anybody that is listening to us who has a connection with that particular field of study or invention right now, we need to be connecting with those people and making sure that they understand accessibility as well as we can educate them so that as they are building this monster, that at least it understands who people with disabilities are, what we’re capable of contributing, and that they should be helping AI that is, should be helping us to contribute even more. Because as we both agreed before we started this, there is a huge amount of talent in this world that belongs to people who have a disability or a chronic illness that results in them having a life like someone with a disability. And that talent, that ability, is currently being lost to most companies, nonprofit agencies, or government entities. And so hopefully we can communicate with these people developing generative AI, the people that are working on the next version of AI, and encourage them to understand people with disabilities and build that stuff so it does make our lives better and so that it doesn’t maybe cause some of us to be left behind in a way that we’ve been left behind for generations.

Dana Jonson [00:34:39]:
That’s a wonderful point, because it only knows what it’s taught. So if the person teaching it or the people or the information it’s being fed doesn’t include people with disabilities or their needs, it’s not going to take any of that into consideration. So that’s a really great point. And I think from my perspective looking at education is we’re preparing children for life, for that next step for independence in life. And we often talk about at the IEP table, teaching children to self advocate. And I think we should be also teaching them not just in their classroom, in college, or not just in their house, where they live or their local community. But this idea of advocacy is much bigger. And as you were saying, you know, whether it’s making the disabilities more understood or understanding where there is a lack of knowledge, you know, understanding where that need is in order to provide that information, and having a seat at the table where whatever component of your life that is in.

Dana Jonson [00:35:49]:
But I think you make a great point that particularly with generative AI, if we’re not teaching it the right information, it’s not going to come up with solutions that incorporate the disability community.

Maxwell Ivey [00:36:01]:
Right. And at this time, what it’s being taught is being taught to solve specific problems for the community, rather than being taught to understand what the community’s overall life challenges may be.

Dana Jonson [00:36:14]:
Interesting. Yeah, yeah. And that’s a really good point. As opposed to just like this is how you make a website so someone who’s blind can see it more. A much more broad understanding of access.

Maxwell Ivey [00:36:27]:
Yes. And understanding of as as much as possible, an understanding of the emotional component that comes with access or lack of access. I recently wrote a post on LinkedIn because I was having an issue with part of their InMail messaging system. And I thought I was just complaining about an unlabeled button. And one of the people who read the post responded back, she said, no, Max, you’re complaining about an inability to communicate.

Dana Jonson [00:36:52]:
Oh, interesting.

Maxwell Ivey [00:36:53]:
The most basic thing that any person in this world has to have in order to. In order to exist is the ability to communicate. And you know, that’s another one of those lessons in my life where I thought one thing was happening, but because I was exposed to somebody who is more about advocacy than I am, I was exposed to something even more significant. I was just thinking it was a missing button. She was like, no, Max, it’s causing you not to be able to communicate.

Dana Jonson [00:37:22]:
That’s a great point. And when we’re talking about accessibility online, a lot of our communication now is online. I mean, that really is it. That inability to communicate and interact with businesses or platforms online is that lack of communication. Right. That’s the first thing we try to understand with children is what are they trying to communicate to us? That’s half of my cases is trying to understand what children are trying to communicate. So that’s such a wonderful way to look at it and understand, as you said from A broader perspective right now.

Maxwell Ivey [00:37:55]:
That makes me think of something I was involved with earlier this year. And maybe now I’m seeing that a little differently. I read about this when I was writing the article, but maybe it just didn’t hit me as hard. And talking to you today has made it a little clearer for me because you deal with kids and you just said figuring out how to communicate is half your caseload. I did an evaluation of the Braille Legos for Reviewed magazine and one of the things I read online was that when kids don’t learn how to communicate in writing at an early age like their peers do, that it can cause them difficulties with communicating later in life. That can affect their, their educational outcomes as well as their career outcomes. And so one of the things we talked about in that article was how the braille, while it was part of a fun activity, was designed to start teaching these kids at a very early age in a setting that was play oriented, the letters and the words, and get them started about thinking about communicating in words as opposed to communicating with speech.

Dana Jonson [00:39:04]:
That’s so smart because for seeing people, they are seeing the letters all over the place, right? They’re seeing the written word and the written communication. But a child without their sight would not have that same level of exposure. And I know, I remember from working in the public school when kids came in kindergarten and you’re doing the reading activities, you could tell who was exposed to books at home and who was not prior to coming to school because there’s a vast difference in their ability levels. So again, that’s something that I wouldn’t even think of. But that makes perfect sense that we do need to understand that written word, even if, even if you can’t see it. Did that make sense?

Maxwell Ivey [00:39:46]:
Yeah, that makes total sense. I didn’t get, I’m a blind person. I’ve been blind since the mid-70s, early 80s. And it was something I had to have explained to me. So I didn’t get it. But it is, it is one of those things. The way we talk and the way we communicate in general, a lot of that is affected by whether or not we are exposed to communicating with the written word as well as the spoken word. And the more I have been thinking about the braille egos, the more I’ve thought, well, that’s kind of like the written word for a blind person.

Maxwell Ivey [00:40:23]:
And we probably are much more verbal, but we probably struggle more when we get to those places in the educational system where it’s all about writing this stuff down for people well, yes.

Dana Jonson [00:40:35]:
And we don’t necessarily write the way that we speak, so there’s that difference too. It’s nuanced, but I would expect that would be different as well. Even when you think about business, the way you write something, even just a business email versus an email to your friend, there are nuances that you would. You don’t write somebody in business in text speak. Right. We’ve learned how to write a proper letter, hopefully at some point in our lives. Well, this has been very enlightening, Maxwell, and I really do appreciate you taking the time to talk to me because I think these are all such really important components. And understanding the accessibility of the world outside of school is so important because that’s what we’re preparing our students for is life after school where they don’t have necessarily all of the supports that they get through special education and understand that.

Maxwell Ivey [00:41:31]:
Thank you. I want to, I want to thank you really, for, for having me on the podcast, but I want to go a little beyond that because as I was looking into your show, I realized that I am not exactly the guest you usually have. But I love how you saw beyond what most people would have with a definition of their show and said there are things that mags can talk about that can benefit my students or benefit my audience. And so I just want to let you know how much I appreciate you going outside the box of your show that most hosts would put themselves in and stay in.

Dana Jonson [00:42:09]:
I’m a former special ed teacher, so I’m very creative and I don’t like to be stuck inside of a box. And I think what you have to share is incredibly important to my audience because we, all of our students are going to grow up and they’re going to be adults and a lot of them are going to be in the business world or in the real world on some level. So, you know, understanding what is out there and what isn’t and what we can advocate for as parents now or as teachers or administrators to help our students make those transitions and what we need to teach them so that they can later advocate for themselves, I think is critical. So thank you so much for coming on and sharing your information. In my show notes, I’m going to have all your contact information. But I know and we didn’t, you know, your, your website is the accessibility advantage. Correct.com yes. Calm.

Dana Jonson [00:43:07]:
And you can be [email protected] and I will have all your social, social information up on my in the show notes when this comes out. But is there anything else that. That I missed or that we didn’t cover or that you want to share with the audience?

Maxwell Ivey [00:43:23]:
There is just one thing. This is something a lot of people who know me know that I. That I like to sing and I enjoy playing around with, with writing songs and, and I’ve got this, this little song I’ve been working on about accessibility that I like to share when I do podcasts on the subject. So if it’s okay, I would like to do that and then we’ll probably.

Dana Jonson [00:43:42]:
Absolutely go for it.

Maxwell Ivey [00:43:43]:
All right. Accessibility ain’t just for those with disabilities. Makes the world better for everyone online as well as in person. Brings more people to your sides every day and every night. Most people forget about us. It makes you grow within our eyes. Disabled people we tell our friends and share to our social signs. Don’t think about how hard it is Just focus on those dollar signs.

Maxwell Ivey [00:44:37]:
Cause accessibility ain’t just for those with disabilities.

Dana Jonson [00:44:45]:
Love it. I love it. Thank you so much.

Maxwell Ivey [00:44:49]:
Well, thank you so much and I’ve really enjoyed this and look forward to talking to you again somewhere down the way.

Dana Jonson [00:44:55]:
Absolutely. Thank you so much for joining me today. Please don’t forget to follow this podcast so you don’t miss any new episodes and leave a review when you have a chance. If there’s anything you want to hear about or comment on, please go to my Facebook page, Special Ed on Special Ed, and find me there. I’ll see you next time here on Special Ed. On Special Ed. Have a fabulous day.

Disclaimer [00:45:15]:
The views expressed in this episode are those of the speakers at the time of the recording and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer or company or even that individual today.